Heavy, large boxes are routinely abused beyond normal handling techniques.
Not even delivery insurance will prevent mishandling. I have 2) 70 Pound pelican cases. They are very tough, but UPS has found some weaknesses in them. Broken latches, handles. Ive had a $3000 Mac pro damaged even though it’s surrounded by 2.5in of foam all the way around. I’m thinking it had to be dropped from 8ft or higher to do that to it.
No amount of Lab testing would reveal that, because it’s unreasonable treatment.
I think the best thing they could have done would be to take out private insurance on them, and let the cards fall where they may.
Other than lining the boxes with Proofgrade (A great idea by another poster here) I think they have done about all they can with packaging.
I hope they have at least threatened to take their business elsewhere. Here in the states I’ve found UPS to be cheaper/rougher on packages and Fedex, more expensive/reliable. I’m a little gobsmacked that no one has reported their Glowforge was delivered by Fedex. They could at least test the water, and grab some data.
The weird thing is that while they were waiting for new packaging you would have expected them to have built up a stock of machines. But that doesn’t seem to be the case because, now that they have it, only a small number of emails have gone out and they are still having to wait for dispatch. Only the replacements get dispatched quickly.
If this is the case, I don’t get why they don’t just add drop sensors to them and then claim back any damages from UPS. If it really is 5% failure, that’s pretty damned good. Either that, or palletise them and be done with it.
I’m inclined to agree with @chris1 I’ve seen this kind of thing in previous jobs on big hardware projects and this is exactly the kind of thing which mad life hell.
they used fedex for the PRUs, probably because that’s what their small office account is set up with and they shipped those from Seattle (i think).
i wonder if UPS has a partnership with flex such that they get a discount for using them instead (or maybe the cost delta between them and fedex was simply greater than the company was willing to bear).
I would think that adding a few shockwatches to the packages would improve handling, and at least make the shipper a bit more responsible. I don’t think you can file a claim based on Shockwatch status alone. If you think the drivers Drop N Go now, imagine what would happen if the package had a tripped shockwatch.
This would certainly be the direction to go if they can’t the shipping damage under control. There are many delivery options for large pallet items available - world wide.
Look at Woot. They sell thousands of giant TV’s all the time. These are always shipped via freight, as they are too large for UPS or FedEx. I’ve ordered a number of these, and they have never arrived damaged.
Though, I suspect GF management are pretty savvy on the business end, and that shipping damage may not be the root of the delays.
agree, i think there’s some issue that’s cropped up in production or assembly. no idea what, since it seems like they have a solid working product. i wonder if one of the components has a high failure rate that they can’t nail down yet.
i mean, of course, they could be sitting back and laughing because they have all the answers, but little ol’ me can only speculate with what’s available.
Looking at the badges page and looking at the “Owner” badges…there are 6,088 “Owners”. So, presumably, there are potentially 6,088 people that have ordered a GF.
Now, I’m pretty sure there aren’t 6,088 active users in this forum…certainly not reporting if they’ve received an email from GF.
So, the “only a small number of emails have gone out” is based on official GF staff reporting…or based solely on the small percent of GF “Owners” that are active in the forum and have decided to share that they’ve received an email?
What I’m saying is…when we say that only a few “golden ticket” emails have been received…we should actually say that only a few active forum members have received their “golden ticket” emails. Who knows how many others have received their emails but aren’t active forum members.
We can only make assumptions based on limited official correspondence from GF staff…and unofficial forum correspondence. We can’t correlate active forum participant’s experiences to all 6,088 “Owners”, just yet.
That are forum members. I think the total is more like 10000.
The latter of course. But so far they have only sent emails for first day domestic basic orders and a few regulars. That sets a cap on the total unless they prioritise non-active forum members.
If the case was that they had shipped out a large volume to owners who weren’t active in the forum, I’m sure they would be doing damage control, by stating they had shipped XXXX numbers of Glowforges. or that they were shipping XXX numeber today.
I find this scenario unlikely.
Event the small sampling from the crowdsourced spreadsheet shows a definite trend looking as though it will be 6 to 7 weeks for them to complete Day one orders (This does not count Pro units)
We can deduce a reasonably close idea based on what we do know.
For instance, the first day sales were around 750 units (we know this because @dan is quoted in a few articles as stating that they sold 500 units in the first 15 hours for total of $1M in sales, and they closed the day with $1.5M in sales), with around a 50% mix of Basic and Pros (we also know this from statements made by @dan.
They are effectively sending out Golden Emails in the order in which they were purchased. We now know (from a Facebook post) that someone who ordered on day 2 received their Golden Email. This tells us they have at least sent out all US Basic Golden Emails for day 1 orders.
Being kind to GF, and assuming all day one Basic orders were US bound, and no one cancelled, that would mean roughly 375 Golden Emails for Basics have been sent since they began sending notices on May 13th. (Again, this is a generous estimate)
To your point - while not a few, it does point to them being pretty far behind.
Also, I don’t think you can use the 6,088 Owner badge number as an accurate assessment, as not all GF purchasers are registered users on the GF main site (which, I believe automatically sets up an account here). The option to create an account did not exist until a few months after sales began.
Nothing happens at all. The PRUs all had Shockwatches and I believe all the recipients noted that theirs were tripped (and most were Drop N Go unless the recipient was standing in the driveway).
i’m pretty sure you could make a forum account before sales started. i dunno if they went in by hand and disabled the accounts for users that then didn’t buy a unit, or if they only thought to do that for cancellations.
Yep, they were all fine. When we started reporting it we it turned out that it doesn’t take a lot of shock to set them off - even just their flipping the boxes he wrong way up (they were all being delivered with “this end up” pointed not up ). I don’t think the PRUs showed any of the UPS inflicted damage - but they were delivered via FedEx. Still drop & go and not oriented correctly but not ripped or mauled.
The packaging might actually be an integral part of the manufacturing.
It might be impossible to store and stack a large number of units without packaging.
My brother did a stint at a UPS sorting facility. He told me how they’d play games seeing how far they could throw the boxes. I just shook my head, what is wrong with you.
Hey Chris,
Have you seen any posts that say a pro has arrived, I haven’t seen any “I got my pro announcements” that would be a WOO-HOO day.
But about the parts you hit the nail on the head lead time for components has stretched out. I work down the street from Flex in high tech manufacturing. We have seen our lead time skyrocket, but that said FLEX has the buying power to put us to shame and we do 2 million units a month and each unit can have hundreds of pieces (resistors, cap, inductor silicon etc. ). Flex has the pull but it depends on there desire to throw resources at the project. They built the first X-Box and they had multiple dedicated lines in fact they had dedicated buildings do just the x-box there buying volumes were 100s of millions needless to say they have the power to get parts. I agree with the failure rate at the factory when they test the higher power parts they may be running into inadequate specifications on components. Like a 5R resister when it should have been a 7R if that’s the case it will take time to debug and if they change components cost go up and testing has to be done which takes time. Of course the is all speculation and conspiracy …humm I may have to go buy a few Flex buddies a lot of beers…
